Greetings,
RAND, the supposedly "reasonable fees" policy
seems backwards to me;
especially RAND seems not only to be against the original
"Berners-Lee" spirit such as when the W3C was founded,
but also a long-term threat against the prolific and
widespread nature of the Web. It further increases the
rampant tendancy the industry has these days, of taking
out the technology from "small people" and putting in
the hand of corporations, which ends up being bad for
users, customers, and good only for corps. Any newcomer
to the web can understand this: who will be able to pay the
licence fees? Not your average small company or developer.
And big corps are known for stiffling innovation in the end,
innovation just does not always intersect the short-term
interest of the juggernauts of this world.
Corps. switching from a mere "consultancy" role into an
"under control" situation on the W3 board, like seems to
be their long-term goal, will only reinforce the Open
movement that some of them (MS is on the board, right?)
seem keen on fighting, and make more and more people,
developers and users alike, reach their "upset" threshold.
That is, the stage at which they can't stand all this ... stuff
any more, throw away anything proprietary and base everything
they do on exclusively corp-free intelectual property, I'm
getting closer to this quite fast myself, these days. Talks
of creating an alternatve standardizations organ to the W3C
sound crazy yet, but just make things really ugly, make people
"cross their threshold" and things could get interesting.
Not speaking for my employer,
Cedric Degea, Software Engineer @ Metrix, 15 trav. Brucs,
Valbonne, FRANCE (one mile away from the Inria/W3C Sophia
Antipolis HQ, as coincidence would have it).